Read Instances of the Number 3 for Free Online

off to at this hour?’ and he, slightly embarrassed, had murmured, ‘Mass. Go back to sleep.’
    Frances had submissively rolled down the dip in the aged mattress. When Peter returned she was propped up against an unyielding bolster reading about Matisse.
    ‘It’s nice when one’s prejudices are confirmed,’ she said, noticing his slight awkwardness. ‘I always suspected Picasso was a bastard. He encouraged his toadies to throw darts at poor Matisse’s paintings.’ Then, seeing hewas still fiddling with the change in his pocket, ‘I waited breakfast for you—I must love you a whole lot because, frankly, my dear, after last night I’m ravenous!’
    At that, Matisse was tipped to the floor and it had been some time, after all, before breakfast was ordered.
    She had not enquired about the Mass, sensing that this was a subject which, if it was to be raised at all, must be so by him. And two nights later, over dinner in a restaurant in Montmartre, he did himself bring it up. ‘When I was in Notre-Dame,’ he dropped the name casually, ‘there was a beggar woman some rows in front of me—pretty tatty and quite niffy, I should think. When it came to the Sign of Peace everyone kissed her or shook her hand most courteously.’ They were discussing declining standards of manners in Britain.
    ‘But mightn’t that be true also at an English service?’ She was shy of speaking the word ‘Mass’.
    ‘Maybe. But afterwards she was looking a bit unsteady on her pins and a young man, a very well-dressed young man—good clothes—took her arm and helped her down the aisles outside. He wasn’t a relative, or anything to do with her—I was watching: he went off afterwards in a quite different direction.’
    ‘Do you think it’s their being French or being Catholic that makes the difference?’ she had said, feeling bold enough to broach the topic.
    And he had replied, quite casually, ‘I’m a Catholic, if it comes to that, but I’m not sure I have their manners—really, it does seem to be a different culture here.’
    That Bridget was unaware of her husband’s faith was something which Frances had suspected before Peter’s death. Just as well, as it turned out, for otherwise, shecould have put her foot in it. Peter could never have guessed that the two would become such intimates—if that was what they were, for ‘friends’ did not quite capture it—no, ‘friends’ wasn’t it at all, Frances thought, leaving the house that afternoon when the young man had so disarmingly referred to her and Peter as ‘sweethearts’.
    ‘Sweethearts, we are sweethearts,’ Peter had said to her. In the ‘childlike’ spirit he had bought her a bag of coloured sugar hearts. How could that young Iranian have known? Frances, nostalgically remembering the sagging French bed and the hard usage they had put it to, wondered again if it was the lovemaking which had occasioned that early-morning visit Peter had made to Notre-Dame…
    Bridget, as it happens, had found a rosary hidden in one of the small interior drawers of the oak desk but she had thought little about it: Peter was a man who collected talismans—worry beads from Greece, Maori carvings from New Zealand, fragments of lichen-covered marble from abandoned Turkish temples. Rosary beads were merely one among the many superstitious fetishes which had accumulated at the close of Peter’s truncated life.
    To the end of that life Bridget remained ignorant of her husband’s faith and her own role in his observance of it. Without other information to go on Bridget had chosen the cremation service for Peter on the basis of her own preferences. It would suit her to become ashes—‘ashes’ was what she, herself, felt like; to have her husband rendered into an ashy condition seemed perfectly acceptable. She enjoyed shocking the cremation officials by asking scientific questions about what thepost-cremation remains were actually composed of. ‘What about the coffin?’ she had